The present invention relates generally to the field of data communication and networking, and more particularly to methods that communicate within a Central Electronic Complex (CEC) and between CECs InfiniBand™ and RDMA over Enhanced Converged Ethernet (RoCE) provide support for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technology are existing, known technologies for high speed connectivity between hosts and servers. InfiniBand is a trademark of the InfiniBand Trade Association. These technologies are implemented in a networking environment with additional hardware and corresponding software, including drivers and application programming interfaces. This means that using these high-speed technologies requires server programs, applications, and clients to code to specific low level APIs to exploit them. For example, instead of sockets, User Direct Access Programming Library (UDAPL) would be used to communicate using InfiniBand.
There is a large existing base of servers, applications, and clients that are coded to the TCP/IP sockets interface for communication. For these programs to exploit high speed interconnects in the current art, significant rewriting of their communication methods would be required. This is a major undertaking and may not even be practical in some cases (for example legacy applications whose source code or coding skill is lost). In addition to the implementation cost and long term cost of sustaining multiple APIs in each application, new and unique network administrative requirements must be addressed (e.g. configuration, enablement, High Availability, security, network load balancing, and various TCP/IP related Quality of Services (e.g. SSL)).
The current state of the art solution for this problem is Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP), which bypasses TCP/IP and provides an alternative protocol stack “underneath” the sockets layer. This solution allows applications, which are coded to the widely adopted sockets standard, to run unmodified and the SDP stack under the sockets layer handles all the communication. However, businesses still rely on legacy firewalls, load balancers, and other technologies to manage and secure their networks. These technologies rely on the ability to manage TCP/IP setup flows to perform their function. Because SDP dispenses with these flows, these network elements would have to be reinvented for SDP. Additionally, many TCP/IP stacks are mature products with built-in security, quality of service, tracing, and auditing, etc. capabilities that have no corresponding feature in SDP.
Because of these limitations, SDP is perceived as unsuitable for multi-tier enterprise level business environments with complicated security, high availability and quality of service requirements.